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Abram Van Engen

Abram Van Engen is Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis and co-host of the podcast Poetry For All.

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Poetry for the Church

Poetry fills the Bible. It spills from column to column and page to page. It covers one-third of the entire Old Testament. The book of Psalms, the largest book in the Bible, offers up 150 poems. Surrounding those poems, one prophet after another laments, condemns, and comforts in ringing lines of verse. The entire creation story of Genesis 1, quite arguably, has been composed as a single poem of repetition and variation, crowned by the creation of human beings.
June 24, 2024
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Poetry’s Mad Instead

We have a Creator who calls on the creation to create. We have a God who calls us to praise God’s marvelous deeds and summons us to sorrow over the sins of this world. Poets draw us into praise and sorrow through the songs they sing. They reconnect us with God’s world by wrenching this world awry. Their “mad instead” nourishes the faith of the faithful by making the familiar fresh.
September 13, 2021
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Like Jacob and Esau:The Historic Postures of the RCA and the CRC

Throughout their long history, the Reformed Church in America (RCA) and the Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRC) have been much like those famous biblical brothers, Jacob and Esau. Born from the same Dutch Reformed mother, they have often fought as only brothers can. A look at their professions, practices, and feuds reveals two different mentalities that were present from the start and have yet to disappear. The CRC seceded from the RCA in 1857 to preserve pure doctrine…
January 16, 2004